Teaching

Faculty librarians teach courses related to information literacy and technology instruction. We teach full-term, for-credit courses, and we also teach single or multiple sessions integrated into other courses.

Information Literacy

Information literacy is the set of concepts, practices, and dispositions necessary to engage information both meaningfully and efficiently.  As such, it is critical to any project in which finding, evaluating, and using information is required.

Information literacy is not just instruction in how to operate various information technologies; rather, it refers to fluency with a broader information environment of which such technology is an important part.

Information literacy promotes awareness of the variety of contexts (technological, rhetorical, social, cultural, economic, and legal) which condition the creation, access, distribution, and use of knowledge.

Monroe Library’s Teaching & Learning Team sees information literacy as more than a set of discrete skills and draws upon the Association of College & Research Libraries’ Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education (2016) to shape our instruction program.

In turn, the library instruction program supports the Loyola Core Competencies, which expressly include information literacy.  It also fosters the university’s Jesuit values, which prioritize critical thought.  By teaching information literacy within the major programs, as well as in the Core, we also support SACS Accreditation Standard 3.8.2, which states that “The institution ensures that users have access to regular and timely instruction in the use of the library and other learning/information resources.”

Technology Instruction

The Teaching & Learning Team recognizes a range of approaches to use when teaching technology.  Whether for students, staff, or faculty, self-directed tutorials are frequently an ideal orientation to a new tool.  Monroe Library collects and creates such tutorials, making them available through its learning objects repository Wolf-LOR and on its technology guides. These tutorials are often demonstrations of key functions of a specific software.  

Learning how to apply such tools in a critical way usually requires a different sort of approach -- one which features active, reflective, and collaborative learning.  We design this type of instruction in a variety of formats, and we tend less to stress a particular tool or software than we do a related literacy (i.e. data or media literacy), or metaliteracy.

As with information literacy instruction, technology instruction may be mapped to target courses and specific learning objectives, particularly when it is considered essential to the program’s field.